1. Field of the Disclosed Embodiments
This disclosure relates to systems and methods for providing automated identification mechanisms that facilitate improved efficiencies in inventory monitoring, management and control, including reducing labor costs associated with product placement, product inventorying, and shelf stocking/re-stocking in retail marketing scenarios, and advising consumers/customers regarding product pricing, promotional, nutritional and other information.
2. Related Art
Retail marketing continues to represent an incredibly competitive economic space. Technologic advances have had profound effects on all aspects of the retail marketplace. In a first instance, a substantial percentage of the retail shopping experience, and everyday retail purchase of certain classes of consumer products and goods, has moved to the Internet in an increasingly prolific online marketplace. The online marketplace continues to grow in certain areas including online catalog purchase of consumer electronics, clothing, and other assorted goods that have proven particularly adaptable to online purchase, both for direct delivery to the consumer/customer, or for being picked up by the consumer/customer at a local outlet of a traditional brick and mortar store, thereby streamlining the buying and delivery experience. Online marketing is highly incentivized to attempt to increase its popularity to an increasing percentage of the consumer/customer population. Among the savings realized by the retailers in providing these streamlined shopping experiences to the satisfaction of consumers/customers is a percentage decrease in labor costs based on requiring comparatively fewer employees in a given retailers' location to support the consumer/customer needs in support of a satisfying shopping experience.
There remain, however, significant portions of the retail marketplace that are less amenable to the transition to online shopping. In this regard, local and national chain grocery stores, drug stores, hardware stores, sporting goods stores, automotive parts stores and the like still have their place in the traditional brick and mortar mold supporting significant levels of customer foot traffic daily, even on “holidays.” There have also emerged combination and/or “big box” stores selling a broad spectrum of the products sold by the more specialized outlets and other classes of products.
Regardless of the venue, the retail marketplace is very competitive and extremely sensitive to supporting the highest levels of customer satisfaction. As such, even the traditional brick and mortar stores have embraced certain levels of technologic advancement to enhance their customers' shopping experiences. Store owners and store owner entities expend significant money and time optimizing product placement, presenting aesthetically pleasing retail environments and creating advertising and incentives, all of which efforts are directed at enticing consumers/customers to choose to shop in their stores rather than in the stores of their competitors.
Like their retailer counterparts, product manufacturers and/or suppliers understand the importance of improving the customers' shopping experience as well, particularly in directing retail consumer/customer attention to their products even when placed by the retailers in close proximity to their competitors' goods in the retail environment.
Control of labor and other ancillary costs can be as important for product manufacturers and suppliers as it is for retail store owners and store owner entities, as each seeks to position themselves to most effectively secure and improve their share of the walking consumer/customer population. One example of an area that has seen improvement based on study and application of product and product packaging research and development has been objectively directed at reducing the labor costs in retail store management attributable to inventory monitoring, management and control, including shelf stocking and re-stocking, through the use of innovative modular product packaging, often referred to as shelf-ready packaging (SRP) and/or retail-ready packaging (RRP).
A recent report explained that a large supplier of certain food products undertook directed efforts to increase the ease of handling its products in a manner that had the benefit of aiding the retail store owners in reducing stocking and re-stocking costs through large-scale adoption of increasingly retail-ready or shelf-ready packaging. The supplier studied and implemented what they considered to be a functional, easy-open design for a carton containing multiple individual product packages, the cartons themselves having printed graphics identifying the product boxed therein, and being configured to significantly reduce the steps needed for the retailer to stock numbers of the individual product containers on a shelf. This reported concept, and other like concepts, surrounds use of cases of products that are specifically configured to fit an existing footprint for the supplier's products on the retailer's shelves. The packaging design promotes ease of customer recognition, navigation and use as the customer shops, while being sturdy enough to withstand the rigors of moving through the supply chain from the supplier's packaging site to the retailer's shelf.
What has emerged is a class of increasingly higher technology packaging that often allows a retailer to simply place a pre-cut, comparatively easy opening large carton containing increased numbers of individually-packaged product items directly on the retailer's store shelves rather than opening the more traditional generic brown cartons, and requiring employees of the retailer to stack the individually-packaged product items one-by-one on the shelves. These and other related approaches to packaging benefit the retailers in reducing labor costs by significantly reducing the piece per touch number of product items that retailers' employees are required to touch, stack, align, or otherwise manipulate, in the shelf stocking and re-stocking processes. The implementation of such innovative packaging efforts can also produce other benefits, some of which may be realized by the suppliers as well, including promoting consumer/customer satisfaction in the shopping process for the suppliers' products and realizing significant savings and reduced waste with regard to packaging materials.